Day: November 12, 2008

A coworker approached us today with a corrupted SD card. It was out of her digital camera, and when plugged in, it wasn’t recognized. This looked like the perfect opportunity to try out [Christophe Grenier]’s PhotoRec. PhotoRec is designed to recover lost files from many different types of storage media. We used it from the command line on OSX, but it works on many different platforms.

It’s a fairly simple program to use. We plugged in the card and launched PhotoRec. We were prompted to select which volume we wanted to recover. We selected “Intel” as the partition table. PhotoRec didn’t find any partitions, so we opted to search the “Whole disk”. We kept the default filetypes. It then asked for filesystem type where we chose “Other” because flash is formatted FAT by default. We then chose a directory for the recovered files and started the process. PhotoRec scans the entire disk looking for known file headers. It uses these to find the lost image data. The 1GB card took approximately 15 minutes to scan and recovered all photos. This is really a great piece of free software, but hopefully you’ll never have to use it.

The Washington Post is reporting that the shutdown of one hosting company has caused the total volume of spam to drop by 2/3rds. The company in question is McColo Corp. Both Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing pulled the plug today after a damning report revealed a number of illegal activities happening on McColo’s servers. McColo already had a reputation with the security community. When contacted about abuse, the company would often shift servers to new IP ranges instead of shutting them down. Although not the main source of spam, the company was host to many botnet control servers and phishing sites.

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have just announced the release of the Meggy Jr RGB, a fully programmable handheld console with an 8×8 RGB LED matrix display. Like its big sisters Peggy and Peggy 2.0, the Meggy Jr is driven by an ATmega168 microcontroller and is made up of a bank of fully addressable LEDs. Unlike its siblings, the device boasts six buttons and the ability to be mounted inside of a custom case (or “handle set”) constructed from plastic or wood, drastically altering the look of the console. Using the popular open-souce Arduino environment, users are able to write custom software for the device. While it works great as a game console, of the many possible configurations and suggested uses, we think “disco floor for your Lego minifigurines” is the most amusing.

[nvillar] wanted a relatively cheap way to make a rotary input device for audio mixing. After looking at several options including turn tables and professional audio scrubbers, they decided on the hard drive due to its size, price, and the feel of the disk. The geek factor of using a hard drive as an input device probably didn’t hurt either. They provide schematics and details on how to make it all work. There’s a video after the break of the unit sending signals to a computer. No performances though, sorry.

Hot on the heels of their recent rapid-fire mod, the creative minds at AcidMods have turned out yet another useful hack for for the Wii controller. This time around, they’ve replaced the peripheral’s “A” button with a clickable trackball, allowing the player to quickly navigate menus without readjusting their hold on the Wiimote. With a flair akin to that displayed in their earlier projects, the team even took the time to add LEDs to the track ball internals. Check out the videos of the mod in action after the break.

Reader [Harald] sent us this sweet Pringles can macro photography hack from way back in 2005. Using a Pringles can and a standard Cannon 50mm MKII lens, they have produced some amazing results. The image above is the tip of a ballpoint pen. Not only does he go through the steps to make it, but then goes in depth on how to best set your camera and other good practices for macro photography. Pringles cans aren’t just for holding chips and making wireless antenna.